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That is why I like SharpDevelop. As it is open source, it can be tailored to the needs of the person using it. I have done that, and I am using its code base to create a simple, embedded scripting IDE. (Which may take some time, as I still have to learn more about WPF and stuff).

Microsoft was quite literally founded on Basic. Few of us who were doing software development in the 90′s could argue that Visual Basic successfully lowered the bar for entry such that just about anybody could write a simple program. I would even go so far as to say that Visual Basic was a key to the success of Windows in the 90′s and 00′s.

Old languages never die... and they don't seem to fade away much, either.

The requirement for developers isn't the same as a neural surgeon. In a free market you get what you pay for and if customers want to pay less for crap, it's their choice.

With a surgeon you can't afford to take this risk, but if an 18 year old highschool graduate could perform surgery with the help of advanced robotic tools, then it doesn't really matter.

To reduce overhead for highly qualified staff, a lot of jobs in the medical sector are already being replaced by mere operators who control a machine and the doctor just sits in his office analyzing the data that comes back.

JavaScript is not the answer. The problem with Visual Basic is when they did a complete redo for .NET. Somebody thought that VB should parallel C#. The result is a language that is not as easy for beginners.

Yes. It justifies the existence of managers. Especially managers who hire VB programmers, replacing their C#/C++ staff, because they are more plentiful, cheaper, and don't use complicated architectures that the rest of us use. (Yes, that was actually the reason given to me.)

We interrupt our regularly scheduled code quality content to raise awareness about a recently-disclosed, critical security vulnerability in Rails. On Tuesday, a vulnerability was patched in Rails’ Action Pack layer that allows for remote code execution. Since then, a number of proof of concepts have been publicly posted showing exactly how to exploit this issue to trick a remote server into running an attacker’s arbitrary Ruby code. This post is an attempt to document the facts, raise awareness, and drive organizations to protect their applications and data immediately.

Emacs is an elderly piece of software, dating back to the mid 70's. Its philosophy of allowing people to easily extend it by modifying the live environment is something shared with a few other elderly-but-groundbreaking systems, such as lisp machines and Smalltalk. That philosophy seems rarer now.

Don't be a passive consumer of tools, but instead actively programming your environment.

For years I've tried my damnedest to get away from C. Too simple, too many details to manage, too old and crufty, too low level. I've had intense and torrid love affairs with Java, C++, and Erlang. I've built things I'm proud of with all of them, and yet each has broken my heart. They've made promises they couldn't keep, created cultures that focus on the wrong things, and made devastating tradeoffs that eventually make you suffer painfully. And I keep crawling back to C. C is the total package.

The problem with C is that coders are not as efficient as with higher level programs. That means it is more expensive. Of course, outside of memory management (and hopefully threading in the future), and Spaghetti code, don't have to deal with figuring out how to do something unless it is external (RegEx is the ultimate if time wasting).

In making the move from the Surface RT to the Surface Pro, we step up from 1,366 x 768 resolution to 1080p. Same 10.6-inch screen, just a lot more pixel density. And believe us when we say the difference is appreciable. In a side-by-side comparison with the RT, everything looked a little sharper, a little less pixelated. The "S" in the word "Start" on the Start screen, for instance, is thinner, less jagged than on the RT. It's a difference anyone can appreciate, even people who swear they're not display snobs....

With all of the hype about HTML 5, it sounded like we were on the way to web development nirvana where as long as you coded to the HTML 5 spec, things would “just work”. This is a great idea and it would be true except for the fact that developers are not coding to the HTML 5 spec, they are making sure that their stuff works great with WebKit based browsers. You can’t blame them since Safari and Chrome use WebKit, and therefore a huge majority of their mobile users are on WebKit. The W3C sees the danger of this and is very concerned that WebKit could become the defacto standard.

A previously unknown and currently unpatched security hole in the latest version of the Java software framework is under attack online, according to security researchers and bloggers. Attack code that exploits vulnerability in Java's browser plugin has been added to the Blackhole, Cool, Nuclear Pack, and Redkit exploit kits, according to the Malware Don't Need Coffee blog, prompting its author to say that the bug is being "massively exploited in the wild."

Until it's patched, you might consider disabling Java browser plug-ins when not needed.

When going back to replay classic games I played as a kid to mine them for knowledge, I always fear that any games from the NES era or earlier are too old to learn much from. I tend to assume that many elements of modern design will be missing: no training, bad difficulty ramping, haphazard level design, and so forth. Before writing this article, I was under the impression that many "good design principles" I've come to know and love were invented during the SNES era and iterated on from there. The NES was the Wild West of game development, I thought, lawless and free.... As it turns out, I was totally wrong! Instead of finding something outdated with a ton of nostalgia value, I found an excellent primer in the fundamentals of non-linear game design.

Miyamoto and company invented a number of really clever tricks to create non-linear levels that are still useful today.

2013 should be a wonderful year for designers and developers alike. More opportunities are presenting themselves each day and with those opportunities, risks are taken and trends are set. We’ll see which of these trends survive and which ones may not come to fruition. Are there any other ones you feel will take 2013 by storm?

Bigger, cleaner, flatter? Which design trends are you keen to see more of?